Though it's the height (or trough) of the off season, the cross-country ski world continues to churn. The Estonian star Kristina Smigun recently announced that she will take the entire 2007-2008 racing year off, resting and recharging for the 2008-2009 season, which will feature a World Championships (at Liberec, Czech Republic), and possibly the 2010 Winter Olympics. Frode Estil, the topflight Norwegian racer who retired at the end of the season, recently announced that he will, in fact, be racing this winter, albeit on the private "Team Fast," not the Norwegian national team. Estil, a long-distance specialist, dreams of winning the biggest race of them all, the 90km Vasaloppet in Sweden, to be held in March 2008.
Speaking of Sweden, the national team has been wracked with turmoil this spring and summer with changes. The team's head coach was essentially fired right after the season ended, one of its star women has indicated that she wants to ski instead for Germany, and now the Fredriksson brothers - sprinter Tobias and distance man Mathias - have both left the team to train on their own. None of this is good for the team, which seems always on the cusp of challenging Norway and Germany, but always falls back.
And in the Czech Republic, preparations for those 2009 World Championships in Liberec are not on track, compelling planners to call for the installation of just-retired racer Katerina Neumannova as the head of the organizing committee. If Neumannova's half as good a manager as she was a racer, the 2009 event will be special indeed.